Soft Landscaping and Its Impact in Enhancing the Status of Nigerian Urban Centres: A Case of Jos City Centre, Nigeria

Abstract

A city centre is the central commercial, cultural and social centre of a city where natural and man-made physical objects combine to create a vibrant urban environment with modern amenities in order to serve the needs of all people. Little attention has been given to appropriate landscaping of our houses, neighborhood, towns and cities in recent times. This is traceable to a number of factors among which are, industrialization, agriculture, environmental pollution (noise, air, water, land) urbanization, street open trading, level of awareness have exerted negative impacts on the environment especially in the urban centres.The urban image of the city centre of Jos reveals that there is no functional and interesting landscape elements to modify and beautify the environment, the dryness one experiences in the day usually has side effect on the city dwellers. The immediate picturesque reveals poorly maintained accents at traffic roundabouts, air pollution, indiscriminate dumping of refuse, and ramshackle structures as a result of street open trading, hawking etcetera. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the positive impact of soft landscaping in enhancing the status of Nigerian urban centres. The study area is Jos the capital of Plateau State situated in the North-Central geopolitical zone of Nigeria. Data for this paper was gathered through site survey, case study and literature review. This study posits that appropriate landscaping beautifies our private dwellings, government owned structures as well as creating pleasant scenes of our major roads, roundabout, recreation centers which invariably gives a healthy environment devoid of environmental hazards. The paper recommends that appropriate awareness programmes on values of landscaping should be intensified to individuals, professionals, Government and Non-governmental organizations.